How Austerity Kills - NYTimes.com

 

If suicides were an unavoidable consequence of economic downturns, this would just be another story about the human toll of the Great Recession. But it isn’t so. Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity. (Germany preaches the virtues of austerity — for others.)

As scholars of public health and political economy, we have watched aghast as politicians endlessly debate debts and deficits with little regard for the human costs of their decisions. Over the past decade, we mined huge data sets from across the globe to understand how economic shocks — from the Great Depression to the end of the Soviet Union to the Asian financial crisis to the Great Recession — affect our health. What we’ve found is that people do not inevitably get sick or die because the economy has faltered. Fiscal policy, it turns out, can be a matter of life or death.

How Austerity Kills - NYTimes.com

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Report says Pennsylvania lags in public health spending - mcall.com

 

Pennsylvania's public health spending ranks in the lowest tier of states, according to a new survey released Thursday.

Public health officials said the study released by Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation may not present a full apples-to-apples comparison with other states, but that shouldn't detract from the main finding that the federal and state governments are failing to keep up with public health needs.

The findings in the report, "Investing in America's Health: A State-by-State Look at Public Health Funding and Key Health Facts," showed that Pennsylvania ranks 43rd for per-capita state public health spending.

The state also gets a relatively small piece of federal public health spending, ranking 47th for state spending by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 32nd for per-capita spending by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.

Report says Pennsylvania lags in public health spending - mcall.com

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Report calls for doubling nation's public health spending - The Hill's Healthwatch

Report calls for doubling nation's public health spending - The Hill's Healthwatch

The United States spends more on healthcare but lags behind the rest of the industrialized world in life expectancy and childhood mortality because the government "chronically" underfunds public health systems, the Institute of Medicine argues in a new report out Tuesday.

The report calls for doubling federal spending on public health from $11.6 billion to $24 billion a year "as a starting point to meet the needs of public health departments." The report points out that Americans spent $8,086 per person in medical care in 2009 versus $251 in public health spending.

The IOM's Committee on Public Health Strategies to Improve Health goes on to recommend that government advisers develop a "minimum package of public health services" that every community should receive from its state and local health departments. It suggests creating a new transaction tax on medical care services to help pay for the increased spending, which over time could lower healthcare costs by reducing obesity and tobacco use.

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